TL;DR
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Of the roughly 4.25 million BTC that are considered ‘ancient supply’ (meaning they were mined more than 7 years ago), only ~356k of them have ever changed hands!
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On Thursday, 139 BTC, which hadn’t been touched since June 2011, moved into a newly created segregated witness (SegWit) address.
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The owner of the BTC has lost their conviction about the cryptocurrency and are gearing up to sell (at a huge profit).
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The owner may have simply moved the BTC for their own security.
Full Story
Fun fact of the day: of the roughly 4.25 million BTC that are considered ‘ancient supply’ (meaning they were mined more than 7 years ago), only ~356k of them have ever changed hands!
(With many believed to be lost forever).
Of course, more BTC has been mined since then, and plenty of those coins have changed hands loads of times – but still.
Which brings us to this story.
On Thursday, 139 BTC, which hadn’t been touched since June 2011, moved into a newly created segregated witness (SegWit) address.
A SegWit address is a type of Bitcoin address that makes BTC transactions faster and cheaper by reducing the size needed to store transactions in a block.
(Kind of like throwing all of your clothes in your suitcase vs. folding them and placing them in there neatly).
So why did this mystery person move them?
The two main theories go something like this:
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The owner of the BTC has lost their conviction about the cryptocurrency and are gearing up to sell (at a huge profit).
This is possible, although with the next BTC halving cycle coming in less than a year, having gone through all the booms and busts over the past 12 years, it seems like a strange time to sell.
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It may be for their own security.
The owner may feel that their original address was compromised, and they’ve moved it to a new address with additional security measures.
Either way, whenever coins from an ancient supply move, it gets people talking.
Perhaps not as many of those 4.25M BTC have been lost after all!
